A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) technology manager said there’s still no broad agreement, in government or industry, on how to regulate increasingly capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Rudolf Rojas made the comments September 15 at the GovExec Government & AI Summit in Washington, D.C., according to a MeriTalk report.

Rojas said the comments come amid a broader debate over how fast AI development should move, and what role government should play in setting rules for it. He said policymakers and AI companies need to work together, even though neither side agrees internally on the right approach yet.

A Fractured Industry, a Fractured Government

Rojas pointed to a split within the AI industry itself. “Nvidia is not all for collaboration and slowing things down. Whereas, OpenAI and some of those other tools are certainly worried about it,” he said.

He said the same lack of agreement exists in government, leaving policymakers without a clear starting point on what role they should play.

Competing Voices on AI’s Pace

Rojas’ remarks followed a string of public disagreements over AI regulation. 

President Donald Trump said on September 14 that the federal government already has enough authority to manage AI risks, and argued additional restrictions could hurt U.S. competitiveness against China, according to a separate MeriTalk report.

That statement came after several AI company leaders called for a slower pace of development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay to make the case, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a tweet agreeing with him. 

Rojas said companies developing AI understand its capabilities directly and should be part of the conversation on rules, even though, as he pointed out, they don’t agree with each other either.

The Need for Strong AI Governance

For chief data officers (CDOs), this lack of consensus, at the industry level and inside government, means clear federal AI rules aren’t coming anytime soon. It’s a reason to build internal governance now, rather than waiting for regulation to define the baseline.

The split Rojas described, fast-moving developers on one side and cautionary voices on the other, is playing out inside individual organizations too, not just among policymakers and vendors. CDOs who wait for external rules to settle this tension risk falling behind on AI governance work they can, and arguably should, be doing internally regardless of where federal regulation eventually lands.